“Super Fun Night,” an ABC comedy that stars Rebel Wilson as a loser looking for love, should be an easy sell. Everyone likes a Cinderella story, and, as Kimmie Boubier, a lawyer with a video diary and a weakness for jelly doughnuts, Ms. Wilson must be endearing.

She is, but not in the manner of Bridget Jones. In this show, starting on Wednesday, the actress is closer to the sweaty, bungling hero of Kingsley Amis’s novel “Lucky Jim” — Lucky Kim.

And that’s the point. Ms. Wilson, an Australian comedian who stood out in “Pitch Perfect” and “Bridesmaids,” would rather make audiences cringe than laugh. Her show is bold and has some amusing touches, but the first episode is more daring than funny.

Ms. Wilson, who created and writes the show, uses her plus-size physique for fat-girl sight gags: going to work while sipping a frothy drink through a straw, Kimmie gets her hem caught in the elevator door. Her skirt unravels, stripping her down to her bulging Spanx just as her office crush, Richard (Kevin Bishop), arrives. “Um, this is a really good smoothie,” she tells an appalled Richard.

And that puts Ms. Wilson in line with a more seditious brand of cable comedy and askew of most network sitcoms, which, like “Modern Family” and “Parks and Recreation,” are increasingly more sweet than sour. Even Ricky Gervais, the co-creator and star of “The Office,” who is famous for cruelty to humans, plays a loving, slow-witted nursing home volunteer on “Derek,” his tenderhearted new show on Netflix.

“We Are Men,” a CBS comedy that began on Monday, is a case in point. It’s about four toxic bachelors living in a rental complex in Tarzana, a prosperous but déclassé Los Angeles neighborhood. Tony Shalhoub, Jerry O’Connell and Kal Penn are the divorced men who take charge of a jilted young bridegroom, played by Chris Smith. One of the songs in the pilot is Gloria Gaynor’s anthem “I Will Survive,” as performed by the band Cake.

Photo

In “We Are Men,” Chris Smith, foreground, plays a jilted bridegroom consoled by, from left, Tony Shalhoub, Jerry O’Connell and Kal Penn, who are also unlucky in love.Credit
Cliff Lipson/CBS

The show is not a snarky sendup of loveless nerds or callous swingers; it’s a fairly gentle comedy about burnouts who call themselves a band of brothers. Kimmie also has best friends, Marika (Lauren Ash) and Helen-Alice (Liza Lapira), and they form a trio of misfits who try to buck one another up: none of them ever have a date, so one night a week, they pledge to go out together and shed their cocoons.

The premise is conventional, but the comedy is not.

Kimmie doesn’t say many funny things or engage in witty repartee. And she’s not a brash, confident woman who revels in her curves. Mostly, she mugs, blurts out embarrassing non sequiturs or is bashfully silent.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Male comedians, of course, have been making audiences squirm for years. Mr. Gervais may be at long last breaking good, but the other creator of “The Office,” Stephen Merchant, has a new HBO show, “Hello Ladies,” and the title alone sets it up: Mr. Merchant plays Stuart, a dork with false bravado whose every attempt at flirtation is suicidal.

It’s somehow even more uncomfortable to watch Ms. Wilson, possibly because it is rare in this country to see that kind of crass physical comedy at the expense of a fragile, trusting character. Television heroines who are klutzes and unlucky in love are usually played by pretty actresses like Zooey Deschanel in “New Girl,” or Tina Fey on “30 Rock.” Performers who stray from the Hollywood ideal, like Mindy Kaling on “The Mindy Project” or Lena Dunham on “Girls,” don’t obsess about their figures on their shows and never seem to have trouble attracting men.

“Super Fun Night” has a very similar setup to that of “Drop Dead Diva” (returning on Sunday on Lifetime), which also introduced a heavyset lawyer in love with a handsome colleague, but the heroine of that hit is charming and brainy.

Kimmie at work is more of an idiot savant.

She doesn’t seem to worry about her weight, but her body does seem to weigh on her mind. And she is disarmingly candid. After a night at a club, she tells Kevin that she has to leave before her chest sweat “seeps into my Spanx.”

Ms. Wilson is an original who has proved that she can be very funny, and a premiere episode is rarely the best indicator of how a show will develop. But the first glimpse of “Super Fun Night” is disappointing. Spanx are no longer novel or funny, not when even Oprah Winfrey makes jokes about the brand.

A television review on Wednesday about “We Are Men” on CBS and an ABC show starring Rebel Wilson, “Super Fun Night,” misstated the title of a movie in which Ms. Wilson appeared. It is “Pitch Perfect,” not “Perfect Pitch.”